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Lightbulb Moments: A Series

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde. By Eleanor Skelton, HA Editorial Team. Eleanor also blogs at The Girl Who Once Lived in a Box. Beka Horton wrote and edited most of the A Beka Academy curriculum, produced by Pensacola Christian College. And she’s also the reason I started questioning fundamentalism. Christianity seemed so simple in the early days. I was

But sometimes I consider how close I came, and it frightens me terribly.
But for one error—indeed, an error which could plausibly have been no more than a misprint—I could have had my mind completely closed by that curriculum.

I saw my fellow church-goers raising their hands, closing their eyes, swaying to the music, looks of joy on their faces. And I just didn’t get it…Why would we celebrate the fact that God is going to totally obliterate people who don’t believe in the same stuff we do?

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde. Some of us, when thinking about our “lightbulb moments”, didn’t have long stories to tell. Maybe there wasn’t an exact moment we could pin-point. Maybe it was one, very simple event. Maybe it was a decade of dominoes, falling one by one, each knocking over another piece of our former belief systems.

So, after a few years when I started noticing things weren’t adding up, I asked more questions and assumed, logically, that if my parents could bend the rules and pick and choose where they saw fit, I could too as long as I had a logical, reasonable explanation for wanting to do so.

Lightbulb. Obviously, we all know this wasn’t true, but I didn’t know that at the time, so I was very confused. This is where I ran into trouble.